1. Field of the Invention.
This invention relates generally to the harvesting of vegetation of various kinds and relates particularly to tobacco harvesters in which a plurality of workmen remove selected leaves from tobacco plants as the harvester passes through a field.
2. Description of the Prior Art.
In the past, efforts have been made to provide harvesters of many kinds for harvesting various crops so as to reduce the manual labor involved and thereby increase the efficiency with which the crop is harvested. Historically, the harvesting of tobacco has been a particularly tedious and difficult task which has involved entire families for periods of six to eight weeks to harvest and cure a tobacco crop. Many commercial and educational institutions have involved themselves in designing, experimenting, and building apparatus to reduce the toil and drudgery of tobacco harvesting and this has resulted in many advancements in the art.
In my prior U.S. Pat. No. 3,215,288, which issued Nov. 2, 1965, a tobacco harvester was provided which included a plurality of seats for workmen to hand prime or selectively collect tobacco leaves from the stalks of tobacco plants and place such leaves on a conveyor which lifted the leaves to a platform located above the tobacco plants. At the platform, the conveyors discharged the tobacco leaves into bins at opposite sides thereof and additional workmen removed the tobacco leaves and placed the leaves in a predetermined position within a conventional bulk tobacco rack mounted on a turntable. After the tobacco rack was filled, another workman removed the filled rack from the turntable and placed an empty rack in position to be filled. This apparatus normally required eight people to operate at full capacity and included four primers, two rack loaders, one rack handler and a driver.
In recent years, many automatic defoliators have been provided in which some or all of the tobacco leaves have been mechanically stripped from the stalk and conveyed upwardly where they were discharged into a large container. However, automatic defoliators are non-selective in their operation and have not only discharged usable tobacco leaves into the container, but also suckers, weeds or any other undesirable vegetation which subsequently must be separated from the usable leaves. Also, automatic defoliators are expensive and many tobacco farmers cannot afford to buy such a machine which can be used less than two months in a year.
Some additional examples of the prior art are U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,564,614 to Sowers; 2,933,206 to Alphin, Jr.; 3,841,071 to Pinkham et al; 3,845,609 to Whitley; and 3,885,376 to Johnson.